Wirkungen des Ausbaus erneuerbarer Energien

Impact of renewable energy sources

Background, Objectives and Method

The rapid expansion of renewable energies (RE) is being pushed in order to achieve the targets set in the power, heat and transport sectors by 2020 (EEG German Renewable Energies Act, EEWärmeG German Renewable Energy Heat Act, National Action Plan RE). The objective for the period after 2020 is continuous expansion so that, in the long term, renewable energies are able to take over the main share of energy supply. This requires a transformation of the energy system as it has existed up to now, in which market and system integration play an important role.

Currently, RE deployment is mainly being driven politically. For its political legitimization and societal acceptance as well as for designing the support policy in the future, the different effects of the politically forced expansion have to be analysed systematically and in detail. With regard to acceptance aspects, mainly distributional effects are to be analysed; the positive (reliefs or credits) and negative (burdens or debits) effects for different actors. Alongside the current effects of using RE, future effects will also be considered. In addition, attention will also be paid to the technological, economic and instrumental interactions between RE use in the fields of power, heat and transport.

Benefits: Development and application of methods to estimate other benefits of RE expansion, for example innovation effects and security of supply.

Distributional effects: Development of methods for a differentiated estimation of the price and distributional effects of policy design in the power, heat and transport sectors, differentiated by actor groups (for example by household type, income group, industrial sector, region)

Interactions: Examining the interactions between electric mobility and renewable energies

Macroeconomic model: Integration of the distributional effects and interactions in a macroeconomic model to estimate the impact of forced RE expansion on growth and employment, differentiated by income group and industrial sector at the level of the economy as a whole and at a regional level

Monitoring: Annual monitoring of the costs and benefits of RE expansion